Inventorylab Review: Reduce your Amazon Legwork 2020

As Amazon FBA resellers, we’re all looking for ways to save time and money in processing our inventory. One of the biggest ways I encourage FBA sellers to save time by spending a little money is to use a third-party listing service, rather than listing your FBA inventory directly through Amazon Seller Central.

Table of Contents: take a look at the overall scope of the articlehide

The fewer times you
can touch a piece of inventory as you process it, the better. By
listing through Seller Central…and then printing your labels on a
sheet of 30…and then separating the items out into the various
fulfillment centers, you are spending a lot of time touching each
inventory item over and over and over again. This doesn’t include
the time it takes to sort your products after you bring them back
from sourcing, removing any stickers, and prepping the products with
poly bags or shrink wrap.

The best way to
streamline the listing process is to use a third-party listing
software so that you can scan the item into the software, print and
attach the individual label, and sort the item into the correct
fulfillment center’s box – all in one step.

For our Amazon FBA business, we use the Inventory Lab inventory management software. We love how it helps us streamline the process of listing our inventory, along with many other useful functions that we use on a regular basis. It is well worth the monthly fee to pay for this software and save a ton of time, not to mention gain access to useful reports for our business (we’ll get into that a bit more below).

Inventorylab Review: Features

Easy to add
expenses as you go – no double entry later into a spreadsheet or
accounting program

You can get the
net on any price you choose – merchant fulfilled as well as FBA.
Takes into account your out-of-pocket cost for the item as well.

Automatically
pulls P&L for you when an item sells so you can see right away
if it was a good product for you

Works with a
wide range of thermal label printers

All the
information you need is all on one page and you can see it in a
glance – condition, number of units, cost, pricing,
printing…everything

Inventorylab Review: Interface

Inventory Lab’s
(I’ll be referring to it as IL moving forward) interface is
straightforward. You have notifications/messages at the top right
corner, and the main menu is laid out horizontally at the top left
portion of the screen. Each of the main menu items has sub-menus
right underneath them, which become visible when hovering. This is a
list of all the main menu and submenu items:

Research

Scout

History

List

Open Batches

Closed Batches

Amazon Listing
Errors

Inventory

FBA

Merchant

Accounting

FBA Sales

Merchant Sales

Refunds

Reimbursements

Other Income

Inbound
Shipping

Mileage

Other Expenses

Reports

Supplier
Profitability

Category
Profitability

SKU
Profitability

ASIN
Profitability

Inventory
Valuation

Sales Tax
Report

Profit and
Loss

Help

User Guide

Troubleshooting

Support Portal

It’s worth noting
that as you can see from how the menus are laid out, it’s obvious
that the software focuses heavily on the accounting and reporting
sections. Other than the accounting and reporting section, perhaps
the most prominent other section is the “List” section. This
helps you scan items, edit their listing info and prepare them to be
shipped to Amazon FBA warehouses (if you’re using FBA). They also
help you comply with Amazon’s box content information requirement,
which is an added plus.

Inventorylab Review: Dashboard

The dashboard (as per the image above) provides some vital stats in a visually appealing way without cramming too much data together. It defaults to the monthly profit and sales report but you can easily change the date ranges in the top right corner:

There’s also an
easy data export functionality that is directly accessible through
the “Export” button right next to the date selection drop downs.
On the left side, you have a sales vs profit chart basically
comparing revenue to profit after subtracting expenses.

On the hand-right
side, there’s an interesting pie chart that lays out all your
monthly expenses. We can see that FBA fees, in general, are taking
the biggest portion in terms of expenses, nothing else really
compares. We notice that FBA Transaction Fees are the highest expense
followed by selling fees and FBA inventory and inbound service fees.

What’s beautiful
about all of this is that IL pulls all their data directly from your
Amazon Seller Central account. If you were to do this manually, you’d
be gathering data from a bunch of different sources and pulling your
hair out manually entering the data into spreadsheets and creating
formulas. This benefit becomes really apparent in the accounting and
reporting sections.

Inventorylab Review: Benefits

1. Inventory Lab
is a feature-rich listing service.

We use a desktop barcode scanner to scan an item into the system, and Inventory Lab pulls up the item with all the information we need to price it. It shows the FBA, Merchant Fulfilled, new, and used prices, as well as whether Amazon is selling the item and who owns the buy box. It gives quick links to Keepa for the ASIN of the item, so we can check out sales rank and price history as we’re pricing the item.

Inventory Lab also
lets us know the item’s current sales rank, category, size tier,
and any prep needed, like poly bagging. We can also enter our buy
cost, min/max price, and the supplier for each inventory item, so we
can later generate reports to help us keep track of things like
return on investment or the profitability of certain sources.

2. Inventory Lab
can limit the number of FBA warehouses we send out inventory to.

As we start a batch
in Inventory Lab, we can choose “Live” or “Private” for the
“Workflow Type.” When the “Private” workflow is chosen,
nothing is submitted to Amazon until the batch is completed. The
“Private” workflow sometimes changes the final warehouse
destination of some of the inventory items (so you’ll have to
double check later that the right items are going to the right
warehouses). The good news is that using “Private ” workflow
almost always sends our inventory to fewer total fulfillment centers
than if we had chosen the “Live” workflow or if we had listed our
inventory directly in Seller Central. Gone are the days of sending in
45 items to 8 different warehouses. Personally, we prefer to use the
“Private” workflow when processing our inventory batches for this
very reason.

3. Inventory Lab
comes bundled with the Scoutify sourcing app.

We can’t image sourcing for inventory without the using the Scoutify smartphone app when doing retail arbitrage. We can quickly scan the barcode of an item and have all the information we need at our fingertips to tell us if the item would be a good buy for resale.

Scoutify can quickly
show you each item’s competitors’ prices, whether Amazon is in
stock, potential profit, ROI, sales rank, sales rank percentage, if
you’re approved or restricted from selling the item, how many you
already have in stock, how many you’ve already sold, plus quick
links to request approval for restricted items, and (my favorite) the
ASIN’s Keepa graph, just to name a few. With Inventory Lab, we can
get both our listing service and our sourcing app at one low price.

4. Inventory Lab
has amazing accounting capabilities.

Inventory Lab is capable of organizing all of your finances with their helpful bookkeeping tools. If you want to make your Amazon FBA business profitable, you have to know your numbers. You can’t just assume because you’re getting disbursements from Amazon that your business is actually making money. You have to know where your money is coming from and where it is going.

You can use
Inventory Lab to keep track of your buy prices, sales prices, return
on investment, inbound shipping costs, money going out for refunds,
money coming in from reimbursements, and more. You can even track
your mileage, cost of supplies, and anything else financially related
with your Amazon business – all within Inventory Lab! These are the
types of numbers you need to know in depth for your business so that
you can make better decisions for sourcing, for repricing, and for
other services you might need to purchase.

One of the really cool features of Inventory Lab is that you can generate reports about profitability of your inventory. You can see the profitability of an entire category in your inventory, a particular ASIN, or a SKU.

If you entered in a
supplier during the listing process, you can generate reports on
supplier profitability. You can use the supplier profitability
feature several ways:

to keep track
of inventory purchased by different sourcers you’ve hired

to see if
certain stores or wholesale accounts are more profitable than others

to analyze how
profitable an online arbitrage deal list is for your business over
time

You can also
generate reports about your profit and loss and your sales tax.
Again, the more you know these types of numbers for your business,
the more you’re able to make good decisions for your business.

6. Inventory Lab
can be synced with the BQool repricer service.

We started using the
BQool automatic repricer service in September of 2018. One of the
reasons we started using it is because we can, at the click of a
button, import all of our buy costs from Inventory Lab directly into
BQool’s Repricing Central. This is such a big time saver! Before
you could sync your numbers, a Bqool user would have to manually
enter their original buy cost. Now, Bqool just imports the buy cost —
a huge help when it comes to setting up your minimum and maximum
prices within Repricing Central.

Side note: If you’re
wondering how well Bqool works, just know that for the first month of
using Bqool, our sales literally doubled. This was obviously a game
changer for us, and we never would have even tried it before the
Inventory Lab / Bqool integration.

7. Inventory Lab
can be accessed by a 3rd party prep service.

One of the most
important steps to finally make a full-time income selling on Amazon
is to find other people to do some of the easier tasks for you. One
of the easiest things to outsource is the inventory prepping,
packing, and shipping, especially when it comes to online arbitrage
or wholesale purchases that you can shave shipped directly to a prep
center to help you ship it to Amazon. With Inventory Lab, you can set
up multiple employee accounts to create shipments, FNSKU labels, and
everything else needed to properly ship your inventory to an Amazon
warehouse. Note: the employee sub-accounts do not have access to your
financial information.

Inventorylab Review: Pros & Cons

PROS

All inclusive
listing, research & accounting web application

Easy to use
interface

Ability to
print labels

Ability to
create live batches that go right to Amazon shipment plans

Comes with live
only scanning app

CONS

Expensive
($50/mo)

Accounting
reports are very confusing

Reports of
accounting data not formatting correctly

Unresponsive to
feature requests

No real
community

Founders don’t
talk to their customers anymore

Inventorylab Review: Pricing

They have one plan with details given below with a 30 days trial period.

Inventorylab Review: Trial

InventoryLab is an
all-in-one platform for managing all aspects of your Amazon business.
With Stratify, you can research products, list and manage inventory,
create shipments, analyze and track accounting, track sales & use
taxes, and review any report related to your account.

It is incredibly
clean and easy to use, and the support team is top notch. They have a
free 30-day trial of InventoryLab, or to learn more about it.
InventoryLab also has an app called Scoutify which allows product
research and sourcing features on your mobile device.

Summing Up

Inventory Lab offers
a one-stop shop for managing inventory and accounting processes for
your Amazon business by automatically pulling your seller data to
their web application-No manual entry required. The tool allows
sellers to understand real time profitability and in-stock inventory
value. You can even print labels directly from the app.

The robust
accounting features help you track all of your business expenses from
top to bottom. Everything from fulfillment costs to subscriptions.
Co-founder and CEO Ryan Stephens created Inventory Lab as a means to
solve his own pain points as an Amazon seller. Once he saw the
benefit of the tool, he decided to share it with the public.

In terms of pricing,
we’re impressed by the quality of Inventory Lab’s service for the
money. What’s also been working well for Inventory Lab is that
they’ve clearly been paying attention to their end-users. The
features of adding in Shipping Rate to the ROI calculator and
expiration dates are recent updates based on customer feedback and
rising trends. This is a good sign, since selling on Amazon is a
fast-paced business, and we need our tools to keep up with us. Could
Inventory Lab help you? Try a 30-day trial and see how much extra
time you have for your core business.

Arbitrageinfo's Recommended Amazon Seller Tools:

Known to help businesses sell on Amazon and increase their revenue by recommending the right tools. I run a content marketing agency and operates a number of online properties. You can reach out to me on skype and social media. Skype id: ronniedey.